and symbols would be improved enormously in the modern era? The beauty of Helen of Troy seemed a sufficient symbol to justify the ten-year war between Greece and Troy. By 1914, a world war costing ten million lives required a bigger public-relations budget and a more grandiose symbol: Woodrow Wilson’s war to make the world “safe for democracy.” Only an insistent probing beneath the symbols might lead to the conclusion of Demokos, in Jean Giraudoux’s Tiger at the Gates, that “war has two faces”—that of Helen, but also “the bottom of a baboon: scarlet, scaly, glazed, framed in a clotted, filthy wig.”
That the modern liberal state means voting and representative government, and bills of rights and constitutions—that it grants certain formal rights to its citizens—has obscured the nature of its deportment abroad. The history of Western civilization is clear on this point: it was the liberal democratic nations of the West, with their bills of rights and voting procedures, that enslaved and exploited Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans to a degree unparalleled in world history; it was these Western liberal nations that made the imperialism of Greece and Rome seem piddling and kindly by comparison.
The democracy of liberal states, embodied in their constitutions, bills of rights, and representative assemblies, is reserved for certain constituencies at home, not for peoples abroad. For the United States this restriction is recognized explicitly in its constitutional arrangement, which denies any voice to those abroad affected by its foreign policy. Furthermore, its constitutional arrangement denies a voice to those at home on external matters. De Tocqueville saw this fact back in the 1840s when he wrote:
We have seen that the Federal Constitution entrusts the permanent direction of the external interests of the nation to the President and the Senate, which tends in some degree to detach the general foreign policy of the Union from the control of the people. It cannot therefore be asserted with truth that the external affairs of State are conducted by the democracy.
In the 1930s, the distinction between democracy as applied to domestic affairs and democracy as applied to foreign affairs was underscored by the United States Supreme Court. The Court ruled in the Curtiss-Wright case that whereas in domestic policy the powers of government were limited by the Constitution, in foreign policy it was different:
The broad statement that the federal government can exercise no powers except those specifically enumerated in the Constitution, and such implied powers as are necessary and proper to carry into effect the enumerated powers, is categorically true only in respect of our internal affairs. …
The modern liberal capitalist state, by its essential economic and political characteristics, tends to intensify and expand aggressive warfare. It justifies its actions with its own appealing rhetoric, finding successive, specific epithets for “the enemy,” and decorating its objectives with talk of liberty, democracy, and, above all, peace.
American intervention in Greece was the first important postwar instance in which rhetoric was used by the United States to defend large-scale interference in another nation’s internal affairs. It was accomplished without dispatching troops. It was accompanied by economic aid, and it was justified as anti-communism. Greece exemplified the working creed of liberal America’s postwar policy: the drive to extend the national power of the United States into other parts of the world, the compulsion to make the capitalist dollar profitable and secure everywhere, the insistence that Americans know what is best for other people, and the willingness to use mass violence to accomplish these purposes. Technically, American military intervention in Greece was successful; ultimately, it was disastrous not only for democracy in Greece but for any faith in the proposition that American foreign policy was truly devoted to its own stated ideals. In many ways, Greece was the model of the later American intervention in Vietnam.
Before World War II, Greece had been a right-wing monarchy and dictatorship. Its wartime occupation by Hitler stimulated several resistance movements, the strongest of which was the left-wing EAM (National Liberation Front), a coalition dominated by Communists. With the Germans gone, civil war broke out in 1944 between the EAM and the reassembled monarchist Greek army. By the end of that year, the EAM had liberated and controlled two-thirds of Greece. It was popular, with a membership of two million in a population of seven million, and it probably would have won—if the British army had not moved in with 75,000 men. (British political analyst Hugh Seton-Watson said afterward that “without British action, Greece would have had the same regime as Yugoslavia.”) Two British divisions were flown in by American planes piloted by Americans. An American observer, newsman Howard K. Smith, wrote later:
One would prefer to be generous to the British and say that they attempted to bolster what middle-way and democratic forces there were in order to create compromise and a basis for democracy. Unfortunately, there seems little evidence to support this, and one is forced to conclude that the British were determined to break EAM and install in power the discredited monarchy and its blindly vengeful rightist supporters.
Churchill’s instructions to General Ronald Scobie, head of the British forces in Greece, were: “Do not … hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.”
The EAM was defeated in a few months. Elections were held in early 1946, which were boycotted by the left, and, to no one’s surprise, the monarchists won. Smith said he was told by peasants in a village outside Athens shortly after the election that they were threatened with having the village burned down if the monarchists did not get a majority. During this early postwar period of British control, a right-wing dictatorship came to power in Athens. The elected leadership of the trade unions was replaced by government-appointed rightists; dissident university professors and government officials were fired; opposition leaders were put in jail; and corruption spread as the war-ravaged nation became desperate for food. Under the government of Constantine Tsaldaris, half the expenditures were for the army and the police; only 6 per cent for reconstruction.
In the face of imminent arrest, many former leaders of the ELAS (National Popular Liberation Army, the military arm of the EAM) went into the hills and began arming small guerrilla groups. By the fall of 1946, it had 6,000 men under arms, and was carrying on hit-and-run raids in northern Greece. With international criticism becoming increasingly sharp, the British asked Premier Tsaldaris to liberalize his oppressive regime; instead, he eliminated all opposition parties from the cabinet. The civil war intensified. The ELAS rebels received small arms from Yugoslavia, used Albanian and Yugoslavian territory as sanctuaries, stepped up their raids, and executed hostages. As the jailing and murder of the opposition by the government increased, the rebel forces rose to 17,000 fighters, 50,000 active supporters, and perhaps 250,000 sympathizers.
At this point, with the rebels gaining more and more support and the government having more and more difficulty in putting them down, the British informed the United States State Department that they could no longer continue either economic or military aid to the Greek government. One State Department career man, Joseph Jones of the policy planning staff, later commented that “Great Britain had within the hour handed the job of world leadership, with all its burdens and all its glory, to the United States.”
It was the administration of Harry Truman, heir to New Deal liberalism, that now acted to save the rightist Tsaldaris government of Greece from revolution. The State Department career officers were eager to take over from Britain, and the high-ranking military men agreed that the Greek rebels must be put down. Truman’s popularity was at a record low in the country, and his Democratic party had just lost the 1946 congressional elections to an overwhelming Republican majority. It has been argued that the domestic political situation was a factor in Truman’s decision to move. Whether or not it was, he called congressional leaders to the White House to sound them out on the idea of military and economic aid to Greece, and it was Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson who supplied the most persuasive argument: stopping world communism. Jones recorded Acheson’s argument as follows:
Only two great powers remained in the world,
